<\/span><\/p>\n Brood of hell, you\u2019re not a mortal! –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, \u201cThe Sorcerer\u2019s Apprentice\u201d (1797)<\/span><\/p>\n I<\/span>n a provocative review of Westworld<\/span> (1973), Michael Crichton\u2019s science-fiction film about a futuristic, computerized theme park called Delos, Gerald Mead and Sam Applebaum of Jump Cut<\/span> link the film to the visual culture of the Vietnam War. At the end of Westworld<\/span> one of the main characters destroys a homicidal android gunslinger (played by Yul Brynner) by setting the robot on fire (fig. 1). Reflecting critically on the film in 1975, Mead and Applebaum argue that the burning android conjures \u201cthe image of some \u2018madman\u2019 igniting himself in front of impassive onlookers\u201d (12-13). The reference is most likely to Malcolm Browne\u2019s photograph of the Buddhist monk Th\u00edch Quang Duc\u2019s self-immolation in Saigon on June 11, 1963. The resemblance is striking and pointedly unexpected, not least because one image depicts a spectacular destruction of a fictional machine in a Hollywood film and the other is a record of a human being\u2019s profound protest of the government in South Vietnam. By linking the two images together Mead and Applebaum demand that Westworld<\/span> be seen, especially by American audiences, not as an escape into an imaginary futuristic world but as a kind of futuristic reimagining of the present, what Isaac Asimov called \u201can escape into reality\u201d (332).<\/p>\n Figure 1. Westworld<\/em>: the burning android.<\/p>\n It is easy to see Westworld<\/span> as a reflection of a world that was for many in the 1970s alarmingly out of control. The film focuses on two friends, Peter (Richard Benjamin) and John (James Brolin), who visit Delos to revel in the theme park\u2019s fantastic worlds populated by exceptionally convincing humanoid robots. Early on Peter and John make their way to the part of the park known as Westworld to immerse themselves in a simulation of the Wild West in the late 19th<\/span> century, a period in American history with strong parallels to the violence, imperialism, and racism of the Vietnam era. Upon their arrival, a voice on a loudspeaker reassures the visitors that they are \u201cfree to indulge their every whim\u201d because \u201cnothing can go wrong.\u201d Everything, obviously, does go wrong. Along with the computers that control the park, the robots begin to malfunction, supposedly through the spread of a virus, or what one of the park\u2019s experts skeptically calls a \u201cdisease of machinery.\u201d The initial promise of freedom quickly gives way to a total loss of control over computerized technologies: the robots rebel, the simulations become real, and visitors start dying. Ultimately, John is shot and killed by the android gunslinger, and a chain of violence ensues that climaxes at the end of the film when Peter burns the robot \u201calive\u201d and order, it seems, is restored to the park.<\/p>\n The loss of control in Westworld<\/span> is a familiar one. Advertisements for the film emphasized the volatile relationship between humans and machines by featuring the now commonplace figure of the computer \u201cglitch.\u201d Posters with the tagline \u201cWhere nothing can possibly go worng<\/span>\u201d contain a minor misspelling that presages disaster (fig. 2); when the line is spoken in voiceover in a trailer for the film, the audio is plagued by a similar glitch: \u201cWhere nothing can possibly go wrong. . .go wrong. . .go wrong.\u201d The fatal computer malfunction that undoes the safety of the amusement park recalls \u201cHAL\u201d in Stanley Kubrick\u2019s 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/span> (1968) and the long history of what Scott Bukatman calls \u201cdisobedient machines,\u201d from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe\u2019s magic brooms in \u201cThe Sorcerer\u2019s Apprentice\u201d (1797) and the creature in Mary Shelley\u2019s Frankenstein<\/span> (1818) to the rebellious robotic creations in Metropolis<\/span> (Fritz Lang, 1927), Blade Runner<\/span> (Ridley Scott, 1982), and Ex Machina<\/span> (Alex Garland, 2015), to name a few. As part of this history of (dis)obedience, Crichton\u2019s film grapples with enduring questions that have long been staples of the science-fiction genre: Will the technologies we create improve humanity? Will they replace us or destroy us? Will they make us less human? How much control do we really have over them?<\/p>\n Figure 2. Theatrical release poster for Westworld<\/em> (1973). Source: The Official Site of Michael Crichton<\/em>.<\/p>\n While Westworld<\/span>\u2019s narrative taps into well-worn anxieties about technology, the film still has much to teach us, particularly about how Americans were navigating the rapidly changing techno-scientific landscape of their historical moment. Shadowing Crichton\u2019s futuristic theme park were widespread efforts to comprehend and cope with astonishing developments in everything from space exploration and Cold War science to mass communication, molecular biology, and computers. The 1970s were ushered in by a wave of cultural criticism\u2014for example, Nigel Calder\u2019s Technopolis<\/span> (1969), William Braden\u2019s The Age of Aquarius<\/span> (1970), Zbigniew Brzezinski\u2019s Between Two Ages<\/span> (1970), and Alvin Toffler\u2019s Future Shock<\/span> (1970)\u2014that grappled with the social, political, and philosophical implications of these changes by imagining possible futures and endings for a society in transition. Toffler famously characterized the transition as a \u201csuper-industrial revolution\u201d that threatened to outpace society\u2019s ability to adapt to changes that many held to be the stuff of science fiction rather than realities of contemporary life. Rehearsing earlier criticisms by Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin about the shocks of modernity at the end of the 19th<\/span> century, Toffler remarked:<\/p>\n In the coming decades, advances in these fields [of science and technology] will fire off like a series of rockets carrying us out of the past, plunging us deeper into the new society. Nor will this new society quickly settle into a steady state. It, too, will quiver and crack and roar as it suffers jolt after jolt of high-energy change. It offers no return to the familiar past. It offers only the highly combustible mixture of transience and novelty. (217)<\/p>\n It is precisely this imagined future of a present world on the verge of going up in flames that haunts Westworld<\/span> and is reflected, I argue, in the figure of the burning android.<\/p>\n In what follows I explore how these concerns about \u201cfuture shock\u201d in the early 1970s get negotiated in Westworld<\/span>\u2019s treatment and use of computers. In 1973, computer technologies were just beginning to radically transform American life and, over the decade, would \u201ccreate a totally new human environment,\u201d to borrow Marshall McLuhan\u2019s words (viii). At stake in this transformation was the stability of not only the architecture of society but also convictions about foundational categories such as \u201creality\u201d and \u201chumanity,\u201d which were being challenged by computers\u2019 capacities for simulation. It is significant, from this perspective, that Crichton\u2019s film was among the earliest experiments in combining computerized special effects with celluloid filmmaking in Hollywood. For Brynner\u2019s character, Crichton collaborated with experimental computer animator John Whitney, Jr. to simulate the villainous gunslinger\u2019s robotic point-of-view, which was achieved by using computers to transform celluloid footage into highly pixelated images.1<\/a><\/span><\/span> On the surface, the resulting electronic machine vision\u2014essentially Westworld<\/span> as \u201cseen\u201d by a computer\u2014is a small but marvelous special effects innovation. Considering the climate in which the innovation occurred, however, I argue that the use of digital special effects, to borrow Kristen Whissel\u2019s term, \u201cemblematized\u201d the emergence of a new way of seeing (and seeing with) computers in 1973.<\/p>\n To this end, I situate Westworld<\/span>\u2019s \u201crobot POV\u201d in a broader discourse of uncertainty that took shape around the spread of computerization in early-1970s America and that helps us, looking back on that decade, see how the film resonated and resonates in complex ways. Westworld<\/span>\u2019s use of special effects, and the narrative in which it embeds them, make the film part of a rich constellation that includes everything from the modernity of fin-de-si\u00e8cle<\/span> amusement parks and early cinema to ideas about postmodernism and the posthuman that converge around computers in the late-20th<\/span> century and that continue to unfold. Furthermore, that Crichton\u2019s film was recently reimagined in our digital moment as an HBO television series suggests that the original was both timely and prescient. Looking closely at this constellation, I read Westworld<\/span> not only as an allegory for a world in crisis\u2014for example, as a haunted inscription of the visuality of the Vietnam War or a reflection of an apocalyptic Cold War imaginary\u2014but also as a meta-text about the changing nature of the science and technology that went into making the film itself.<\/p>\n Computers are mostly used against people instead of for people; used to control people instead of to free them.<\/span><\/p>\n -People\u2019s Computer Company (1972)<\/span><\/p>\n A<\/span>mong the special effects employed in Westworld<\/span> is a curious spectacle of seeing through a robot\u2019s eyes. After the android gunslinger shoots John dead, it sets out in relentless pursuit of Peter, whose perspective on the chase is periodically intercut with shots of the gunslinger\u2019s point-of-view. The robot POV is signaled by the appearance of highly rasterized footage that consists of pixels arranged in an array of 3,600 rectangles. The array is introduced in the first shot of the gunslinger\u2019s view of Peter desperately fleeing on a horse from the scene of his friend\u2019s murder when he realizes that the robot is out for blood (fig. 3). The effect is an early version of a computerized film aesthetic and a novel attempt to visualize the optics of an electronic machine, a kind of topos<\/span> in the history of what Alexander Galloway calls \u201ccomputerized, cybernetic, machinic vision\u201d\u2014variations of which would later appear in science-fiction films such as RoboCop<\/span> (Paul Verhoeven, 1987), Predator<\/span> (John McTiernan, 1987), and Terminator 2<\/span> (James Cameron, 1991) (Galloway 53).2<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Figure 3. The rasterized robot POV.<\/p>\n From the audience\u2019s perspective, the amount of abstraction in the image makes Westworld<\/span>\u2019s robot POV difficult to read. The mosaic of tiny rectangles used in the special effect registers only general impressions of shape, colour, and movement. The gunslinger\u2019s lack of visual acuity is exploited for dramatic effect at several points during the chase when Peter briefly avoids detection by becoming motionless and blending with the other information in the gunslinger\u2019s visual field. At one point, for example, Peter masquerades as a broken android and lies down on a table in a lab where machines from the park are brought for repairs (fig. 4). Peter is ultimately discovered when he moves slightly and gives himself away.3<\/a><\/span><\/span> However, this small narrative function aside, for the most part the robot POV is a cinematic attraction, an interesting technological artifact. Figure 4. The gunslinger\u2019s view of the tables in the lab where Peter is hiding.<\/p>\n The use of special effects to imagine how a computer sees was the result of a rich convergence of art and science. The robot POV was created by experimental filmmaker and computer animator John Whitney, Jr., who was given the task of simulating how the gunslinger\u2019s electronic eyes broke the world down into small animated rectangles. The desired effect was limited by conventional special-effects technologies at the time and the fact that the film industry had not yet adopted the digital methods made available by computers. Whitney found inspiration and a solution in the scientific visualizations made by NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory during the Mariner program (1962-1973). In particular, the program successfully used a spacecraft to transmit close-up images of Mars in binary code, which was converted by computers back on Earth into photographs that consisted of coded shades of black and white compiled into rasterized images (fig. 5). Whitney collaborated with computer scientists to develop a similar technique whereby a computer scanned celluloid footage and converted each frame of film into a series of values that could be manipulated at will for aesthetic purposes. Whitney explains:<\/p>\n Once the computer has \u201cread\u201d the image and converted it to a series of numbers, there is tremendous flexibility in what the computer can then do with this numerical information. The image can be reconstituted with different contrasts, different resolutions, different colors. We can enlarge, stretch, squeeze, twist, rotate it, position it in space in any way. In fact, the only limitations are imposed by the creative talents of the person operating the machine. (1478)<\/p>\n In other words, the computer transformed the celluloid image into a kind of \u201cplasmatic\u201d digital painting.4<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Figure 5. Bottom half of Mariner 4 photograph of craters on Mars, 1965. Source: NASA Image ID number: Mariner 4, frame 09D.<\/p>\n Whitney\u2019s celebration of the \u201climitless\u201d artistic control afforded by computers echoes the very utopian fantasy about the relationship between humans and machines that animates Westworld<\/span>. Within the film, the amusement park\u2019s simulations of the Wild West and two other \u201cworlds\u201d\u2014Roman World and Medieval World\u2014are made possible by an intricate network of computer technologies. The androids are linked to a command centre where technicians observe all of the activities in the park on computer screens and video monitors (fig. 6). The resemblance to NASA\u2019s mission-control room is unmistakable (fig. 7). Crichton claims that one of the inspirations for the film was the Kennedy Space Center, and the other was Disneyland (\u201cBehind the Scenes\u201d 1397). The surveillance system in Westworld<\/span> is used to control the androids\u2019 behavior in scenarios that are designed to fulfill each guest\u2019s desires, such as winning a gunfight without the stakes or consequences of committing an act of violence against a real human being. Indeed, the entire premise of Westworld<\/span> is that computers make it possible for each guest \u201cto indulge their every whim\u201d without limits.<\/p>\n Figure 6. The computer control room in Westworld<\/em><\/p>\n .<\/p>\n Figure 7. View of Mission Control during lunar surface Apollo 11 extravehicular activity, 1969. Source: NASA Image ID number: S69-39593.<\/p>\n This premise was already in the popular imagination by 1973. Three years earlier in Future Shock<\/span>, Toffler speculated on the impending realization of<\/p>\n simulated environments that offer the customer a taste of adventure, danger, sexual titillation or other pleasure without risk to his real life or reputation. Thus computer experts, roboteers, designers, historians, and museum specialists will join to create experiential enclaves that reproduce, as skillfully as sophisticated technology will permit, the splendor of ancient Rome, the pomp of Queen Elizabeth\u2019s court, the \u201csexoticism\u201d of an eighteenth-century Japanese geisha house, and the like. Customers entering these pleasure domes will leave their everyday clothes (and cares) behind, don costumes, and run through a planned sequence of activities intended to provide them with a first-hand taste of what the original\u2014i.e., unsimulated\u2014reality must have felt like. They will be invited, in effect, to live in the past or perhaps even the future. (228)<\/p>\n Toffler saw such simulated environments taking shape in the ways that artists were beginning to experiment with the uses of electronic media to create immersive and interactive virtual-reality experiences that would continue through the decade. Bracketing the release of Westworld<\/span>, for example, are computer artist Myron Krueger\u2019s pioneering \u201cPsychic Space\u201d (1971) and \u201cVideoplace\u201d (1975), interactive (audio)visual installations that allowed users to control computerized environments by moving through \u201cresponsive\u201d spaces outfitted with state-of-the art sensors, cameras, and projectors.5<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n The way that Westworld<\/span> represents the possibilities of computerized simulations is not only an invocation of these kinds of real and imagined experiments, but it also calls to mind the discourse of power in the history of animation. As Donald Crafton explains, early animated films frequently displayed hands in the act of animating drawings\u2014what he calls the \u201chand of the artist\u201d motif\u2014to reflect how animators exercise a \u201cgod-like\u201d control over their cinematic creations (415). In Westworld<\/span>, experts wield computers like gods to animate Delos for park visitors. The computerized command centre functions as a kind of omniscient dream machine where engineers and technicians take on the role of all-powerful artists who, like Whitney, have complete creative control over every detail of the park\u2019s mise-en-sc\u00e8ne. The artists behind the scenes use computers to simulate realistic worlds; puppeteer the androids that make those simulations look and feel so real; surveil and manipulate; fulfill desires; and bend reality itself to the will of those in charge. There is no limit, it would seem, to what humans can do with the computers they created. That is, of course, until the puppets cut their strings.<\/p>\n The robot rebellion that throws Delos into chaos is obvious and inevitable, partly because it was foregrounded in Westworld<\/span>\u2019s marketing campaign, but also because the trope is pervasive in science fiction and animation. Before the gunslinger shoots and kills John, there is growing concern among the park\u2019s experts that the machines are malfunctioning\u2014a robotic snake bites John in the desert and a knight stabs a guest\u2014but the aberrant behavior is considered to be a glitch, like a computer virus. When the gunslinger misbehaves, it is clear that the glitch is actually a sign of life and that the machines are not malfunctioning but rather asserting their autonomy from the artist-engineers who created and controlled them. Thus, when we see through the gunslinger\u2019s electronic eyes, we are asked to see the android as more than a machine; this is a vision that has a life of its own. We literally see with<\/span> the computer as it becomes uncontrollable. That this way of seeing the android as a transgressive figure occurred at a time in American history when computers were just beginning to set radical transformations in motion makes the trope of the disobedient machine in Westworld<\/span> deeply historical.<\/p>\n It is not coincidental that the spectacle of the robot POV is introduced at the same moment that the utopian fantasy of Delos collapses. When Whitney turned to computers to craft Westworld<\/span>\u2019s special effects, the United States was in the midst of what Carroll Pursell refers to as a \u201ccrisis of confidence\u201d about technology (134). The crisis was broadly a shift away from postwar optimism toward \u201canti-technology views\u201d (172). The views were largely motivated by Cold War uncertainties about uncontrollable technologies and growing fears of experts, corporations, and the military-industrial complex in light of the technological realities and violence in Vietnam. This shift in perception extended as prominently to the machinery of war as it did to computers. In the years between 1971-1973, computer science made unprecedented advances in cybernetics research, the invention of the internet, and the development of microprocessors that gradually made computers available to the public. Views of these innovations were not entirely utopian. Combined with McLuhan\u2019s radical critical theories of the electronic-information age and the fact that computers were largely the domain of corporations and government entities rather than of \u201cthe people,\u201d the computer, Pursell explains, developed a \u201creputation. . .as an impersonal\u2014even antipersonal\u2014force in society\u201d (185).<\/p>\n It is significant that computers were concurrently taken up by science-fiction films and imagined as disobedient machines. In 1974, Vincent Canby reflected in the New York Times<\/span> on a trend rooted in 2001<\/span> and taking shape with films such as Westworld<\/span> and Richard Heffron\u2019s then-anticipated sequel, Futureworld<\/span> (1976): \u201cThe computers of today are the Frankenstein monsters of yesterday\u2019s gothic fiction. We are tampering with the Unknown\u201d (8). Quoting Michael Webb of the American Film Institute, the Washington Post<\/span> reported similarly: \u201cToday\u2019s monsters seem to be flashing dials, endless banks of computers whirring silently behind walls of gleaming glass\u201d (Kriegsman C1). The narrative structure of Westworld<\/span>\u2014from freedom to disaster\u2014reads like a roadmap of competing discourses on computers and the broader crisis of confidence taking shape around technology in postwar America. Yet the artists behind Westworld<\/span>\u2019s digital aesthetic also wielded computers to produce wonders, and in this respect the film is as much a futuristic vision of computers in the early 1970s as it is an experiment in testing their creative powers.<\/p>\n The imagery of disaster in science fiction films is above all the emblem of an inadequate response.<\/span><\/p>\n -Susan Sontag, \u201cThe Imagination of Disaster\u201d (1965)<\/span><\/p>\n I<\/span>n addition to coinciding with key innovations in the history of computers, Westworld<\/span> appears at a point in the history of special effects when Hollywood was just beginning to explore the aesthetics of computer-generated imagery (CGI). In the 1960s, computer graphics related to techniques and technologies of the moving image circulated mostly in the realm of experimental animation. Mainstream innovations in what we now call digital special effects did not rise to prominence until the late 1970s and early 1980s with the use of computer technologies in films such as Star Wars<\/span> (1977) and Tron<\/span> (1982).6<\/a><\/span><\/span> Westworld<\/span> thus made its home in an important transitional period in American film history that saw a new cinematic optics emerge from the intersection of older filmmaking practices\u2014namely those related to the photorealist tradition\u2014and the digital aesthetics made possible by computers.<\/p>\n From this perspective, Westworld<\/span> is quite rich as an allegory for the cinema. In a 1973 interview with American Cinematographer<\/span>, Crichton acknowledged that the premise of the film\u2014visitors living out fantasies in a futuristic amusement park\u2014was deeply cinematic: \u201cIn some ways,\u201d he explained, \u201cit\u2019s a movie about people acting out movie fantasies. . .wondering what it would be like to be an actor in an old movie\u201d (\u201cBehind the Scenes\u201d 1397). As Crichton would have it, when Peter and John visit Westworld they are not simply experiencing a simulation of the Wild West, but stepping into the cinematic Western. Delos is the \u201cold\u201d cinema remade as a \u201cnew\u201d immersive virtual-reality system, an updated version of Buster Keaton\u2019s dream in Sherlock Jr.<\/span> (1924) of projecting himself into the movies. The reflexivity in Westworld<\/span> touches on everything from the resemblance between the computerized command centre and the behind-the-scenes labour on a movie set to the fact that the android gunslinger was played by Yul Brynner, who appeared notably as the gunslinger Chris Adams in John Sturges\u2019s Western The Magnificent Seven<\/span> (1960). Brynner apparently wears the same costume in both films (fig. 8). Figure 8. Left: Brynner as the android gunslinger in Westworld. Right: Brynner as Chris Adams in The Magnificent Seven.<\/p>\n By weaving a narrative out of androids and amusement parks, Crichton (intentionally or not) taps into two of the cinema\u2019s longest standing affinities. With regard to the gunslinger, it is important that the cinematic apparatus was linked from the very beginning, technically and theoretically, to the automaton. As Alan Cholodenko argues, the link is one of the most enduring throughout film history because the automaton\u2019s ability to blur the line between human and machine speaks to the very nature of the cinema: they are both \u201cvital machines\u201d capable of producing uncanny illusions of life and motion. In Westworld<\/span>, for example, the robots are only recognizable as such by their \u201cshimmering\u201d eyes. We have seen how the gunslinger\u2019s disobedience makes the android within<\/span> the film a vital machine, a computer that appears to have a life of its own. The question of vitality is complicated by the fact that, for audiences of Westworld<\/span>, the android is played by a living human being. Following Cholodenko, the gunslinger can also be seen as an embodiment of the cinema, for the cinema is<\/span> an automaton.7<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Consider that the special effect Whitney created to simulate the android\u2019s vision was made possible by a computer: that is, the computerized robot\u2019s vision was in fact computer generated. A curious doubling is at work in Whitney\u2019s footage whereby the \u201creal\u201d computer\u2014Whitney\u2019s\u2014is folded into the \u201cfictional\u201d one, implicating both machines in the narratives of freedom and disaster that play out in the film. There is a nice resonance, for example, between the gunslinger who digitally \u201creads\u201d the landscape within the film and the computer that \u201creads\u201d the celluloid image to produce the special effect for the gunslinger\u2019s POV. The doubling act is particularly significant in light of the fact that the robot POV is a moving image in transition. Whitney\u2019s special-effects sequence was striking in 1973 because it resembled early arcade video-game aesthetics more than anything \u201ccinematic\u201d at the time.<\/p>\n The representation of Delos is doing similar reflexive work. Like automata, amusement parks share a history with the cinema that can be traced to the emergence of motion pictures. Beginning in the 1890s, amusement parks and the cinema co-evolved as emblems of modernity. They were both sites where the novel shocks, dangers, and bewildering experiences of modern life were transformed and put on display as safe, entertaining, and even liberating spectacles. Coney Island, for example, was designed as a virtual city apart\u2014like the Emerald City in Oz\u2014where, John Kasson explains:<\/p>\n [V]isitors were temporarily freed from normative demands. As they disembarked from ferryboats with fanciful names like Pegasus<\/span>. . .they felt themselves passing into a special realm of exciting possibility, a distinctive milieu that encouraged types of behavior and social interaction that in other contexts would have been viewed askance. (41)<\/p>\n The parallels with Crichton\u2019s amusement park are revealing. Delos is pitched in the film as \u201cthe vacation of the future,\u201d where reality is remade into a fantasy and visitors are \u201cfree to indulge their every whim\u201d by immersing themselves in a simulated world without limits. The film also opens with a scene that closely resembles Kasson\u2019s description of visitors arriving at Coney Island. When we are introduced to Peter and John, they are travelling by hovercraft to Delos. After they disembark from this mechanized Pegasus, they take on new identities as cowboys in Westworld, where they are free to indulge in violence without consequence because reality in Delos is a game. The hovercraft sequence even includes a view from the cockpit that simulates one of the earliest convergences of motion pictures and technologies of virtual travel: the Hale\u2019s Tours ride simulators that populated fin-de-si\u00e8cle<\/span> amusement parks and World Fairs.8<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n It is remarkable that Westworld<\/span> should reanimate these affinities amidst a \u201ccrisis of confidence\u201d about technology. In Electric Dreamland<\/span>, Lauren Rabinovitz argues convincingly that at the end of the 19th<\/span> century \u201camusement parks and movies taught Americans to revel in a modern sensibility that was about adapting to new technologies\u201d (2). That is, by experiencing the realities of modern life virtually and safely\u2014e.g., as a mechanical ride or a motion picture\u2014people could better adjust to radically new technologies and environments that were, in reality, overwhelming, frightening, and potentially disastrous. Angela Ndalianis has argued similarly that, because special effects tend to display broader technological changes during periods of intense innovation, they \u201chave a great deal to do with acclimatizing audiences to different forms of visual engagement\u201d (259). By embedding its special effects in a narrative about automata and an amusement park modeled on fantasies about computers and the cinema, Westworld<\/span> reads like an education in the rapidly changing technological landscape of its historical moment.<\/p>\n The idea that Westworld<\/span> is \u201cabout adapting to new technologies\u201d is useful for making sense of the film\u2019s impulse toward reassurance. Almost as soon as Westworld<\/span> imagines computers rebelling and threatening humanity it imagines the machines\u2019 spectacular destruction: the android gunslinger is ultimately burnt to ashes. The significance of this narrative of (un)controllability is deepened in light of the fact that computers in the 1970s were revolutionizing the relationship between humanity and technology. Cybernetics and philosophy were raising profound questions about what it means to be human, to be conscious, and to be alive. As N. Katherine Hayles has shown, early computers contributed to conceptualizing \u201chumans as information-processing entities who are essentially<\/span> similar to intelligent machines\u201d (7, original emphasis). In this analogy, the human mind was reimagined as a thing that was not bound to the human body, a \u201cposthuman\u201d idea that gets visualized in Westworld<\/span> by the robot POV: we transfer our subjectivity to a computer. Although more latent in 1973, computers similarly upended the nature of the cinema when the digital image began to erode the celluloid image\u2019s indexical bond to reality, which set in motion a crisis of visuality that continues to unfold today.<\/p>\n Symbolically, then, we might say that the robot POV is what Vivian Sobchack calls a \u201ctransitional object,\u201d hovering somewhere between the past and the future, utopia and disaster, the familiar and the unfamiliar. Writing about computer animation in WALL-E<\/span> (Andrew Stanton, 2008), Sobchack proposes that the titular character, a mechanical trash compactor with a microchip core, \u201cserves [in our contemporary moment] as a bridge to the future present of technological development\u201d (387). For Sobchack, WALL-E\u2019s embodiment of the old and the new, the mechanical and the electronic, allegorizes and mediates the transition in the cinema from a celluloid past to a digital future. I suggest we read Whitney\u2019s special-effect artifact in Westworld<\/span> similarly as a kind of \u201cbridge\u201d that, although it is ultimately set on fire, mediates an aesthetic and cultural transition shaped by the cinema\u2019s intersection with early computer animation techniques. (The parallel that Ingmar Bergman draws in Persona<\/span> [1966] between the footage of a self-immolation that appears on a television screen and the subsequent melting of the celluloid filmstrip is uncannily resonant here.)9<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n As if haunted by the growing power of computers to pull reality and humanity apart at the seams, the spectacle of the gunslinger\u2019s \u201cdeath\u201d thus seems to invite the audience to bear witness to humanity asserting its definitive control over an increasingly computerized world. A central concern about the ways that computers were revolutionizing life in the early 1970s was the loosening of what Toffler called \u201cman\u2019s grasp on reality\u201d (231). The concern was fueled by a sense that computer technologies were beginning to erode the distinction both between reality and illusion in their capacities for simulation, and between human and machine in their implications for philosophy and biology, including the possibility that \u201clife\u201d and \u201chuman\u201d would have to be re-imagined if computers were successfully combined with living organic material. The erosion was compounded by the fact that computers were opening the human experience up to infinite new possibilities at a rate that threatened to exceed people\u2019s ability to anticipate, let alone control, the short- and long-term effects of the changes taking place: \u201cThe problem,\u201d in Toffler\u2019s view, \u201cis whether [humans] can survive freedom\u201d (187). Considering this, we might say that, if Delos is a computerized \u201celectric dreamland,\u201d a virtual space where the freedoms made possible by computers are unleashed, the unravelling of that dreamland is presented as a nightmare from which American audiences can wake up. In delivering this lesson Westworld<\/span> positions the cinema as a safe space for playing with and alleviating anxieties about frightening technological changes that were already underway in American culture.<\/p>\n Writing in the 1960s, Susan Sontag called the trend of \u201cimagining disaster\u201d this way in science fiction an \u201cinadequate response\u201d to reality because it does not oblige audiences to address the very real \u201cterrors\u201d that get fictionalized and resolved in the cinema. Westworld<\/span>\u2019s reassurances no doubt make the film complicit in preserving an illusion of safety in the face of radical changes that radiate outward from film and computers to the fate of humanity itself. The act of covering over can be seen as an attempt to make the uncertainties of modern life bearable, to imagine safety in the ongoing nightmares of the Cold War, for example, when humans were grappling with the possibility of their own self-annihilation, which, as Sontag points out, \u201ccould come at any time, virtually without warning\u201d (224). What gets left out, however, is a clear sense that changing the course of scientific and technological innovation is imperative and requires action.<\/p>\n It is precisely what Westworld<\/span> does not ask audiences to see or do that motived Mead and Applebaum to invoke \u201cthe image of some \u2018madman\u2019 igniting himself in front of impassive onlookers\u201d with which I began this article. Drawing a parallel to the Western genre\u2019s tendency to mythologize and glorify American imperialism, they criticized Westworld<\/span> for protecting the American psyche from the dark social and political realities of the early 1970s. While I am primarily concerned with the representation of technology and disaster in Westworld<\/span>, their indictment is worth quoting at length for what it reveals about the reach of the film\u2019s fantasy of control:<\/p>\n It is not [the guests\u2019] conscious awareness that these are robots, non-human machines, that determines their reactions, but rather their feeling and conviction that these \u201cothers\u201d are some kind of less-than-human humans, real, living objectifications of their fantasies. So what we have in fact are the beginnings of a rather thinly disguised racial perspective, an exploitation justified by an explanation\u2014the \u201cothers\u201d are less than human\u2014and by an economic right\u2014the \u201cguests\u201d pay. . . . Nor does it seem coincidental that for the leader of the robot revolt Crichton should cast the former king of Thailand, the leader of the mad Huns, Mexican radical, inscrutable hired killer, the suggestively Mongol-featured Yul Brynner. Along with infrared sensing devices, weapons that kill only the \u201cenemy,\u201d willing, thankful prostitutes, etc., Westworld<\/span> simply provides the triumphant, guiltless hero that Indochina didn\u2019t. (12-13)<\/p>\n Much more can and should be said about Westworld<\/span> as a kind of racialized war game\u2014Mead and Applebaum offer a fairly thorough discussion of this. Here it is notable that the film\u2019s \u201cvacation of the future\u201d premise conjures a related discourse of power in histories of travel in film and related media. Delos\u2019s promise of safety and freedom to visitors who embark on futuristic journeys in the park is reminiscent of the kind of mastery promised by amusement parks, World Fairs, and the travelogue genre in the cinema. These other forms of virtual travel are historically wedded\u2014particularly in the early-20th<\/span> century\u2014to what Jennifer Peterson calls a \u201cvisual imperialism,\u201d a mode of representation filtered through \u201cracial perspectives\u201d of colonialism and tourism that rendered foreign and exotic places safe and consumable for Western audiences (8) (see also Ruoff, Virtual Voyages<\/span>).<\/p>\n This is all to say that Westworld<\/span> was engaged in a similar kind of cultural work aimed at rendering the \u201cmonstrous\u201d and \u201cvillainous\u201d computer safe at a time when the effects of that technology were only beginning to come into focus. This dimension of the film betrays the simplicity of its narrative of reassurance, not to mention the simplicity of its special effects. Crichton offers the computer up as a highly seductive machine\u2014like the cinema\u2014with the potential to satisfy an enduring human desire to exceed the limitations of reality and the human experience. The fantasy is a messy one in which the computer emerges as neither utopian nor dystopian; it is an object of debate and a tool Crichton uses to grapple with the difficulty of comprehending what a digital future might look like, and what might become of humanity if it continues to push technological innovation in the direction of that future. The fantasy is also not simply escapist. Westworld<\/span> works through the cinema to experiment safely with the realities of its unsafe historical moment while covering over a whole range of social and political issues. Looking back on the film from our contemporary moment, the future present that Crichton imagined in 1973 feels very close to home. Given that our networked, media-saturated, and increasingly virtual reality resembles Delos more than it ever has before, we might ask: What kind of work can Westworld<\/span> do for us now?<\/p>\n Don\u2019t give yourselves to these unnatural men\u2014machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines!<\/span><\/p>\n -Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator (1940)<\/span><\/p>\n I<\/span>n 2016, HBO renewed Crichton\u2019s film as a 10-part television series that deviates significantly from the path Westworld<\/span> imagined in 1973. The new version follows the trajectory of the original, but it unfolds largely from the perspective of the androids, namely a rancher\u2019s daughter named Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) and Maeve Millay (Thandie Newton), a madam in a brothel in Westworld. Whereas the gunslinger\u2019s POV was an important special effects attraction in Crichton\u2019s film, the shift to the android perspective in the HBO series is primarily a narrative device. Dolores and Maeve are unaware of their machine natures, but as they play out their programmed roles over and over for the park\u2019s guests, they slowly become haunted by memories that cause them to question what they consider to be their humanity. Their questioning is profound\u2014What does it mean for a machine to feel uncertain about its nature? Or for humans to imagine a machine\u2019s uncertainty for that matter? The questioning is also the source of the androids\u2019 disobedience: Dolores embarks on a quest to unravel the mystery of her place in Delos, and Maeve arranges her own escape from the park by modifying her programming. Ultimately, it is revealed that one of the park\u2019s founders, Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), spent decades secretly designing the androids\u2019 search for answers that would lead to their rebellion and freedom. Unlike the original Westworld<\/span>, however, there is no fiery android death; in 2016 the machines win and, as if taking up Chaplin\u2019s call, declare their humanity.<\/p>\n While a lengthy analysis of the series is beyond the scope of this article, the manner in which the 2016 version renews the allegorical dimensions of the original is worth mentioning, even if only to open up a dialogue about what the connection reveals about our enduring fascination with that decade and how we are dealing with the \u201cfuture shock\u201d of our contemporary moment. Most notable here is the fact that the lack of reassurance in HBO\u2019s Westworld<\/span> is pervasive and daunting. Whereas Brynner\u2019s gunslinger is cold and mechanical, these new androids are humanized and sympathetic, the tragic victims and playthings of humans who commit acts of murder and sexual violence almost mechanically. Seeing humans mechanized and machines humanized compels us to question our humanity, especially when by the end we might find ourselves rooting, against our nature, for our own demise. To compound the inversion, some characters that we are initially led to believe are human\u2014such as the lead programmer Bernard (Jeffrey Wright)\u2014are later revealed to be androids, which makes everyone in Delos suspect. As the machines\u2019 existential crises unfold it becomes more and more difficult for them and for us to determine if their questioning is a sign of life or the result of their programming; if the memories that haunt them are real or fake; and if what we are witnessing is occurring in an android\u2019s dream or in \u201creality.\u201d The narrative also employs an increasingly ambiguous flashback structure and \u201creboots\u201d so often that even determining precisely where, when, and if events occurred becomes a challenge. The web of uncertainty is one from which there is apparently no escape for us.<\/p>\n Yet why weave the web? If Peter\u2019s destruction of the gunslinger in 1973 is more or less comforting, what is the successful robot rebellion in 2016 doing<\/span>? The difference no doubt makes the new Westworld<\/span> more distinctly postmodern than its predecessor. Take, for example, Jean Baudrillard\u2019s quite fitting assessment of the spectre that haunts both Westworld<\/span>s: Disneyland. Writing in 1981 in the light (or shadow) of the impact of electronic media on conceptions of reality, Baudrillard claims, \u201cDisneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real\u201d (12). In other words, humans create \u201csimulations,\u201d such as amusement parks, androids, and the cinema, to answer the question of what is \u201creal\u201d\u2014i.e., reality is real because<\/span> Disneyland is fake. Baudrillard suggests that the faith we place in this distinction covers over the fact that the distinction is imaginary, that there is no \u201creal\u201d and \u201csimulation\u201d but only the \u201chyperreal\u201d (12-13). Whereas Crichton questions but ultimately preserves this faith\u2014Peter successfully defends reality against the simulation and secures the distinction between both categories\u2014the HBO series seems to be exploring what it would be like to embrace hyperreality, perhaps as a way of working through the unique challenges of our historical moment.<\/p>\n In an interview about Westworld<\/span> (2016), the show\u2019s creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy suggest that their version grapples with the fact that, in the 21st<\/span> century, humans are living very real lives in the virtual realities made possible by videogames and the internet. Nolan explains:<\/p>\n As our world becomes more cloistered and the experiences we choose for ourselves, especially in the West, we\u2019re able to design not just our environment but also our intellectual environment to suit our preferences and predilections. We are, you know, sort of designing this odd prophylactic universe in which we can\u2014we can do whatever we want (qtd. in Gross).<\/p>\n On one level, the idea is that computerized technologies have finally transformed our reality into the Delos that Crichton imagined. On another, we have so thoroughly diffused the real into the electronic phantasmagorias we create that \u201creality\u201d exists for us in the digital age only as a flickering memory. The Westworld<\/span> that Nolan and Joy imagined is thus a fraught escape into the plural realities in which we find (or lose) ourselves every time we turn on our TVs, boot up our computers, or pick up our smartphones.<\/p>\n By asking us quite unapologetically to bear witness to the disappearance of reality as we knew it, it may well be that that the dark mirror the HBO series holds up to us is doing a different kind of work than the original. The series is noticeably less about special effects and more about the impossibility of disentangling humanity from the digital technologies that define how we experience, understand, and \u201cdesign\u201d our environment, as Nolan puts it. Seeing from the perspective of the androids now is not like imagining seeing through the eyes of an unfamiliar machine\u2014as the computerized robot POV allowed audiences to do in 1973\u2014but like encountering something like our android selves. It is also revealing that the perspective audiences are asked to take now is shifted from the predominantly male cast in 1973 to female leads in 2016, and that many of the central characters in the TV series are people of colour, especially given the prominent lack of diversity in the original film. The new Westworld<\/span> seems to grapple more openly (although problematically) than the original with the politics of race and gender that are currently playing out, sometimes violently, in the media, in the cinema, and in society in the United States.10<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n It thus cannot be coincidental that Westworld<\/span> has reappeared at a time when humanity is once again being torn apart at the seams by forces that are increasingly incomprehensible. Just as Mead and Applebaum saw their violent historical moment reflected and refracted in the sublime image of the burning android, we might be haunted by the uncomfortable and quite devastating familiarity of the new Westworld<\/span>. Particularly in the United States, the techno-scientific realities of surveillance, cyberwarfare, social media, and governance are wreaking havoc in old and new ways on everything from politics, race, gender, and class to civil liberties and the very fabric of culture, if not humanity, itself. Is it any wonder that the first season ends with a striking scene of a diverse android army led by women emerging from the woods on the edge of Westworld seeking violent retribution? (fig. 9) Viewers find no solace in this place because this is not a cinema of reassurance.11<\/a><\/span><\/span> Indeed, perhaps that is precisely the point: to bring us closer to what Sontag might call an \u201cadequate\u201d response to the terrors and uncertainties of our present realities. If nothing else, when looking out at our Westworld, we should feel the deep urgency of Goethe\u2019s question, \u201cShall the entire house go under?\u201d Figure 9. Top: Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) taking aim to assassinate Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) and initiating the android revolution. Bottom: The android army emerging from the woods to bring a violent end to humanity. Episode: \u201cThe Bicameral Mind.\u201d<\/p>\n Asimov, Isaac. \u201cEscape into Reality.\u201d The Humanist<\/span> vol. 17, no. 6, November-December 1957, pp. 326-332. Print.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cAn Escape into Reality<\/span>\u201d: Computers, Special Effects, and the Haunting Optics of Westworld <\/span>(1973)<\/h1>\n
\n
\nShall the entire house go under?
\nOver threshold over portal
\nStreams of water rush and thunder.
\nBroom accurst and mean,
\nWho will have his will,
\nStick that you have been,
\nOnce again stand still!<\/span><\/p>\n![\"Figure](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/Williamson_Figure_1-1024x430.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Figure](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/Williamson_Figure_2.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nFuturistic Visions of a Digital Present<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/Williamson_Figure_3.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Figure](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/Williamson_Figure_4.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Figure](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/Williamson_Figure_5.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Figure](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/Williamson_Figure_6.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Figure](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/Williamson_Figure_7.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nWestworld<\/span> and\/as the Cinema<\/h2>\n
![\"Figure](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/Williamson_Figure_8.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThe Memory of Reality<\/h2>\n
![\"1](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/Williamson_Figure_9.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nWorks Cited<\/h2>\n